Lost in the Funhouse (4 page)

That’s right, Andy….

Kindergarten. Trauma.

[As depicted in epic semiautobiographical novel always and ever in progress—these portions written October 25, 1979, one week after the author had wrestled women on
Saturday Night Live
for the first time.]

Um.

First day of class. Mommy had fed him breakfast, got him dressed neatly.
“Hold it, honey,” she said, and fixed his collar and buttoned his top button. “There you go … fit as a fiddle.”
Always hated top button buttoned. Mommy made him always. She waved as bus pulled away.
He wanted to cry, but was too shy in front of all these strangers.
At school, teacher goes around room asking each child to introduce him/herself.
As it got closer to the little boy’s turn, he became very very extremely nervous, repeating his name in his head over and over again so he would get it right. Finally, when it was his turn, he couldn’t do it. A little voice in his head said, “Come on, just say your name,” and he wanted to very much, but no voice would come out of his mouth.

“And what’s your name?” The teacher was looking directly at him. “No? Not today? Oh, all right.” And she smiled understandingly at him and directed her attention to the next child. “And what’s
your
name?”

If he had ever felt like crying, now was really the time. He had never felt such embarrassment in his whole five-year-old life. He sat there, forcing his jaw to stay open, knowing that if he let it close, he would definitely cry and then be even more embarrassed than he already was…. As he sat there and saw all the other kids saying their names, he felt that they were all looking at him and saying to theirselves, “Look at that baby. What a baby! Well, I’ll never play with him! He should be totally ashamed of himself. So very very extremely ashamed that he should hang his head down so he’s looking at the ground and when he walks he should keep his head between his legs.” When he looked up, he noticed that no one was watching him….

Well … some would watch when he wasn’t looking, when he was
off alone/oblivious behind the school playground, obscured by the little cluster of trees, where he repaired to continue his riotous broadcasts. School had seriously interfered with his ritual of afternoon bedroom performances. Now at Saddle Rock Elementary, he relegated programming to lunch recess period; other children played amongst themselves; he played amongst himselves (for the entertainment pleasure of unseen millions as usual). Once he had reached first grade onward, he could compress his sprawling cavalcade to a solid solitary outdoor half hour of extravaganza, and he thrilled at his own ability to make it such a tremendous success. Out in TVland, his loyal viewership had come to adore his every song dance fall leap spin face voice character movement gyration yodel instrument solo symphony fight victory defeat commercial trick and tale. He was a smash! Huge and very very extremely famous. He knew this certainly and one day so would everyone else.

Later, much later, after people, many people, certainly not
everyone,
had begun to sort of know who he was and journalists came to ask him about how he got to be the way that he
was—this was all according to master plan, of course—he
would recall his excellent work in the woods behind the school. He would conjure and reenact these performances for whoever poked deeply enough. He would coalesce
years
of stored recess broadcasts (all the way up through fifth grade, in fact), slipping into each splendid reverie with fresh conviction….

“I could only do one program a day…. For a while, I did my version of
American Bandstand
where I played the Dick Clark part. I was the emcee Andy. Then I would be each of the performers—the rock-and-roll stars. Then I would be the kids dancing. Finally, I would be all these things at the same time…. For a few months, I put on a monster show called
Horror House.
I’d be strangling myself, yelling, going, ‘Get away from me! Get away from me!’ Then I’d turn around and do the other part:
‘Errggh, I’m going to keel you!’
‘No! No!’
‘Errggh!’
So if someone had been watching me, they’d think I was crazy…. Oh! And I’d do wrestling, too! I put on a wrestling show where I’d play both parts—I’d be both the bad guy and the good guy and wrestle myself.

“One day a kid was chasing a ball and he came into the woods
where I was doing a horror show:
‘Getcha hands off me!’
‘No! No!’ And I’d be serious. I wasn’t trying to be funny, but it would look like a crazy man. He stayed there and watched. The next day another came. A few more every day. The word got around. And do you know that after a while I had an actual audience! I really did!

“They’d be clapping….

“I was just a nut doing this stuff….

“I was serious about it, but I suppose to them it was funny….

“They were laughing….

“I wasn’t trying to be funny….

“They thought I was nuts and that’s what they were laughing at…

“I wouldn’t care, you know. I’d still continue doing my shows the same way.
But they would be watching me….

“Then, one day in the second or third grade, something funny happened. My show ran overtime and I was announcing the closing credits on the way back to the building after recess. Real serious. I was saying,
‘That’s all from
The Andy Kaufman Show!
This program was brought to you live by—’
All of a sudden, by my side, I heard a voice go,
‘No, this program was brought to you dead!’
I said,
‘No, it was live!’ ‘Maybe yours was live,’
this voice said,
‘but mine was dead.’
A kid who was watching me had begun doing the same thing on the other side of the playground. We finished our two shows together. We looked at each other and started laughing. We were exactly on the same wavelength! It was beautiful. We became best friends.

“Every day we started putting on shows together. It was a partnership. Before that, I never had any friends—I was ‘nuts.’ I still remember his name: Alfred Samuels. After a while my parents thought he was crazy because he talked to himself and they forbid me to be friends with him. They also thought there was something wrong [with me], but not nuts like this guy. I was their son, so they loved me…. The funniest thing, though, is that his parents thought the same thing about me! His parents ended up moving out of town. I never saw him again. I wonder what ever happened to him….”

Um.

Stanley and Janice never knew of any Alfred Samuels.

Nor did anyone else who knew their son.

Nor, quite apparently, was there ever such a boy.

Except for one.

Not counting Dhrupick.

Howdy had Buffalo Bob and what great pals they were! One really couldn’t exist without the other (they even sort of sounded alike), it seemed to him. And they had other good friends like Flub-a-Dub and Mr. Bluster and Dilly Dally and, of course, the antic mute Clarabell the Clown (see—quiet could be fun!). Then on
Terrytoon Circus
(on which host Claude Kirchner told him every evening to go to bed afterward like “all good boys and good girls”—for which he and Michael were inspired to throw things at the Dumont screen), Heckle had Jeckle and vice versa (and they looked an awful lot alike; magpies, whatever). Mighty Mouse, meanwhile, had other identities, disguises, kept pretty much to himself (unless Mr. Trouble a.k.a. the idiot cat came to hang around). Superman was two guys who were one guy. Popeye ate spinach and became a different/same Popeye. And then there was
Winky-Dink and You,
which was really Winky-Dink and him: Equipped with his very own Official Winky-Dink Kit, he could draw directly on the TV screen—with magic crayon over green cellophane—so as to interact with (and often make fun hiding places for) his cartoon pal with the star-shaped head. As such, essential lessons in friendship and in persona had washed over him and stuck deep. “It seems to me that he took so many of those programs very seriously,” Stanley would say. “They gave him ideas that he never forgot.”

Lessons at school were less intriguing. He was disinterested in his studies, always would be, would always be thinking of other things instead. “He didn’t work hard at all,” his father recalled. “He didn’t work any harder than he had to. He got average marks without studying. He was a very, very smart kid, but he never wanted anyone to know it. For whatever reason. It was always my impression that whatever his ability was, he didn’t want it to be known. It was his secret.” Thus there were
teacherparentconferences unending. He hated Mrs. Sanders of the second grade. “He would make faces at her, drive her crazy,” Cathy Bernard recalled. “He mimicked her. She was the type who said,
‘You do this, you do that!’
There was no room for anything other than what she told you to do. For someone like Andy, that was the perfect foil.”

Eventually, the debut was at hand.
The time had come.
“At school,” he said, “every week or two, I was bored with being myself.”
As such.
“I’d go off into fantasyland.”
Always nicer there.
“Sometimes I’d be my twin brother Dhrupick.”
Of course.
His father had traveled to Japan on jewelry business and returned with kimonos for the family. And so it was that Dhrupick, finally, flamboyantly, officially, came out of his closet. “One day, in second or third grade, I was looking in my closet and saw the kimono and I decided to wear it to school. I forgot I had it on. When the teacher asked, ‘Why are you wearing that, Andy?’ I said, ‘I’m not Andy. I’m Andy’s twin brother Dhrupick.’” He remembered being immediately sent to the school psychologist … or was it just that the teacher shrugged, rolled her eyes, as usual, and let him be? Or was it both? Or did it ever happen at all? Well, that was how he remembered it anyway. He always liked the kimono story. Everyone seemed to like the kimono story. It was a good story.

Meanwhile …

Janice would become pregnant with Carol. The house on Robin Way would begin to shrink. Always there was ruckus. Michael broke Andy’s neck. Well, they liked to say that—it was a bad strain, really. They wrestled a lot. They imitated the Spanish wrestlers on TV. Margaret watched her gospel shows and the boys made fun of her and switched the channel over to the wrestlers whenever she turned her back. Andy was in traction for maybe three weeks with the neck. It never hurt all that badly. He was very very proud. He liked the traction thing, the ropes. He liked the broken neck thing very much. Once he and Michael stole all the newspapers from everyone’s front stoop, then threw them down the sewer. Stanley went crazy (yell-yellyell), went out and bought the neighborhood new papers, delivered
them with beet-faced apology. Andy liked blaming Michael for everything. Like the time he snipped all the buds off the rosebush in front, then said Michael did it. Stanley went crazy (yellllll); Michael got spanked. Perfect crime. The brothers decided to repaint the living room furniture one Christmas to surprise their parents. Wood, upholstery, everything. Some great-aunt gave them the paint kit. Redyellowgreenblue, everywhere. Stanley went crazy (yellllllllllllllll), rolled each son into a ball and threw them across the room onto a (painted) couch; they bounced and bounced. Thank God for the homeowner’s insurance. Big fat Grandpa Paul kept bringing stuff. He got them a movie projector and reels and reels of movies, shorts and features: funny cowgirls singing on stick ponies. The Little Rascals trapped in a spookhouse. Boris Karloff as the Mummy. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. He also kept bringing them new records, then took them to make their own records, took the whole family to the small-fry amusement park Kiddie City, ten minutes from home, again and again, to sing songs in the recording booth. They were little blue records. Paul and Stanley loved taking turns in the booth with the boys, making like corny Hit Parade announcers. Michael Troubadour Kaufman sang children’s favorites. Andy Troubadour Kaufman sang both original compositions and hits of the day. He sang “Your Cheatin’ Heart”; nobody knew where he learned it. He sang “Love and Marriage” and “My Baby Don’t Love Me No More” and “Let Me Go, Lover” and, very frequently, “It’s Howdy Doody Time.” He was never shy when he sang, only shy when he didn’t. Or so his family noticed, with continued amazement. At such moments, he was without all inhibition and rather dazzling. He rarely forgot a single lyric. Such focus, precision. Odd. Carol was named after Papu Cyril. She was very beautiful like her mother. She was born the day before Andy’s seventh birthday. Stanley and Janice said she was his birthday present. He was not thrilled especially. Within months, the cameras in his bedroom walls had to be removed. They were reinstalled in a much larger house where he would eventually perfect the (friendly) world which only he would, or could, inhabit.

3

Paths are taken but also given. Fate, stars, moons—he would later listen carefully to what they told him about who he was and why and how and where he would go. He shared his birthday with Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, which he would take as a sign—identities/invincibility. (Others born January 17, about which he cared less: Benjamin Franklin, Al Capone, acting theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky, silent-comedy director Mack Sennett—all of whom, like him, followed their divergent instincts unyieldingly.) His day of birth, he would discover, came with an astrological mandate—that he would do exactly what he was supposed to do and do it no matter what anyone else thought and no one would ever tell him otherwise.
(Was anyone else really there?)
He would never ask permission nor would he ever understand the meaning of permission. Thus, the hollerings of his father would increasingly become mere racket to him, an unpleasant din he would drown by whatever means most amused him. He lived for amusement, so much so that
he became amusement—and that was his path and he went forth determined and oblivious. Now whenever a new passion enraptured him, he absorbed it entirely, became proficient at it, commanded it, finally showed it off to others (this last was most imperative to the plan). A new and finer hyperkinesia flamed throughout his awkward body, made it adroit, precise, confidant. When amused, when amusing, he beamed, he was beautiful. When his father forced him to attend athletic summer camp or play Little League baseball—well, there would be photographs in family albums of a boy sodden in unspeakable misery, quite limp/lost, quite out of context. Stanley later regretted doing that to him, humiliating his son by assuming that he was like any/every other template of American boyhood, that his son was anything at all like the boy that even he himself had been. No, here was a different boy with a mission.
(Very serious about it … maybe funny to others … wasn’t trying to be funny …
) And there would be, in all actuality, without metaphor, a different drummer—a very very extremely different drummer—and the different boy found the different drummer’s drumming in short order and then great changes took hold. Hence, the march of a lifetime ensued.

Everything enlarged. Beginning with the house. They moved to the best part of town, to King’s Point, long considered the most prestigious corner of Great Neck—albeit to a relatively new and modest subsection therein. This was summer 1956; the property at 21 Grassfield Road cost $52,000; houses here were built on lush berms and set far back from the street. Now there were five bedrooms, including Margaret’s on the lower level near a laundry facility and a smallish den which would become a sanctum most hallowed (and often forbidden)—the place a certain mind’s eye pictured whenever feats were performed in the outside world that had been born and practiced endlessly down there. Anyway, this would be the last family home they would all know together.

Stanley Kaufman’s career in costume jewelry had obviously also
enlarged, though not without struggle and frayed nerves and ongoing dreams of escape and hopeless irritability attendant. He would eventually call this house—sturdily spread, tri-leveled, prefab-sided, with attached two-car garage, on enormous lot—“the best investment of my life.” His job responsibilities were by now more than commensurate with his talents—besides fully engaging his bright business acumen, he was even designing KARU product lines of earrings and pendants and such. Still, however, working with his father and his father’s partner gave him much
tsouris,
much doubt. “The truth is, I had just bought the house and things were terrible downtown. You’ve got to understand—at no time in all the years I was with my father did I ever have any feeling of security. I had to be a very, very conservative person because I could be out of a job at any moment. These two men were at it almost every day of the week—‘We’re gonna break up this goddamned business!’ I’d not only hear it at the office, I used to drive home with my father maybe three days out of five and it was always a rehash. I thought,
Forget it!
It was awful. Nothing pleasant about it at all. So the commitment of the new house came with the headache
of Can I sustain this?”

Chaos at work required perfect o-r-d-e-r at home—order unimaginable, thus unachievable, in a household where three young children grew and cavorted. And so, too, the rages enlarged. Janice took/accepted the brunt. Stanley, the otherwise good and loving husband and father, would have to vent and rant for years to come. (Was there no aspect of his world that he could control?! How he tried-picking out furniture and decor for the house, selecting clothes for Janice and the kids, shopping for groceries, designating basic tasks for all—but damned if the results ever turned out exactly as he wished.) His frustrations and furies were to be a Grassfield Road continuum. His wife heaved her sweet deep sighs and patiently understood—she once wrote a poem and handed it to him and left the room—

“I’m wishy washy, dull as can be;

No one asked you to marry me.

But you liked those traits and gave me a boost;

For that I let you Rule the Roost….

If I choose something that I like to wear,

You say, “No. Wear this.” As if you care.

But other times, I don’t know why,

You’re so indifferent, you make me cry.

Now try to be nice—let’s not fight,

Tell me, which dress should I wear tonight?”

The children, however, could not abide the storms. They witnessed their father carping at their mother, wishing she could stop him, knowing that she wouldn’t. “For the most part,” Michael remembered, “she just took it. Here was this fragile little woman—I was amazed that she didn’t cry when he yelled at her. She hardly ever did. Sometimes she would even start it by asking him a stupid question. She drew it out. Carol, Andy, and I would look at each other and go, ‘Why is she doing it?’ We’d see it coming and think, ‘Watch out! Let’s head for our rooms!’ But they somehow were able to have a sense of humor about it. I think he once had a T-shirt made up for her that said,
DON’T YELL AT ME!
And she had one made for him that said,
I’M NOT YELLING!
”

Carol turned from infant to teen with the cacophony ever resounding, wincing at it always. “I saw her as a doormat, a victim,” she recalled. “He’d bark, ‘You left the lights on!’ ‘Burnt steak again!’ ‘Where’d you get this meat from?!’ I’d be sitting there with knots in my stomach. It was almost like having an alcoholic father, in terms of not wanting your friends to see what was happening—and sometimes they did. I remember seething inside and thinking, ‘Just tell him to shut up!’ Later, I’d sometimes tell her, ‘Leave. Just pack your bags, take us and leave.’ Mostly, I just went and turned up the stereo.”

Andy kept silent about it. Then and for always. Excused himself from the table, from the room, from the family, from the reality. He rarely spoke of his father’s noise to anyone for the rest of his life; it never really came up in normal conversations; of course, he would make an inadvertent point of never actually having normal conversations;
they never really came up. (Certainly, he would personally withstand gusts of that same anger as he grew and tested paternal patience.) But he paid enough attention to the tone of the torrents-shrill, nasal, sibilant, snappish, relentless. Strangely, he would one day know a particularly bilious lounge singer who seemed to replicate, bleat for bleat, the singular staccato of Stanley Kaufman’s fulminations. Enlarged on them, even. And though he would have a very special affection for the unpleasant lounge singer, he never really approved of all that terrible yelling. It just wasn’t very nice.

Storms came and went, trailing wakes of regret. Regret brought reprieves, big fun happy ones. Coney Island was best. It became a family ritual, beginning when Carol was tiny, continuing on through always. Janice loaded the kids into the car and Stanley took the D train from town after work and they’d meet in the parking lot and nights of wonder unfolded. Rainbow lights swirled and spun; saltwater breeze swept calliope music into the muddle of screams, laughter, shills, nonsense. Such was Coney—that, plus neat sideshow freaks. (Upon arrival, every time, two big wide eyes got bigger and wider and danced better dances. What was seen here, heard here, was what lived behind those eyes since forever. Home. This. Best place anywhere. Absolutely. He always said so.) Food came first, per ritual. Stanley filled the bellies of his brood with fabulous Nathan’s Famous hot dogs and french fries, then chow mein on rolls, then corn on the cob, then custard, then jelly apples and cotton candy. (Cotton candy:
Oh!)
Then they rode everything, repeatedly—the Steeplechase, the Parachutes, the Rotowhirl, the Wonder Wheel and the mountainous, monsterous Cyclone. But of course—the Cyclone!—towering behemoth, legendary roller coaster of the gods, famous for its seemingly ninety-degree plunge toward certain death. It was, to be sure, Andy’s favorite, would always be. He made a prop of it. For every turn on the ride, he created elaborate performances around the bliss/terror. He liked to announce in shrieks at the apex:
“We’re all going to die!!”
He liked to feign desperate protests before boarding
—Oh please, no,
please-please-please, I-don’t-wanna, noooooo!!!
Best of all, he liked to disembark weeping hysterically, until his father or mother or someone told him to knock it off, at which point his face resumed repose and he smiled and said, “Okay.” (Could turn on a dime. Like that. Liked doing that like that. Interesting. Was only fooling. No, really.)

Coney Island stayed inside of him.

Performances picked up. Got more daring. He had transferred to Baker Hill Elementary after the move to King’s Point, then quickly found a new wooded nook behind the school playground for his stagecraft. Boy in bushes continued apace with aforementioned flights. He would recall spending weeks in class expressing himself only in the voice of Jerry Lewis. (“And I had never seen Jerry Lewis.”
Nasal, hyperspastic, self-infantilizing.
“I just could not talk unless I talked like a little boy.”
More and more teacherparentconferences redux.)
In cold weather, he furthered his inadvertent study of response testing: At his mother’s insistence, he wore layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of clothing to prevent chill. Then, upon entering school, he methodically—never hurriedly—removed each layer after layer after layer after layer, which incited laughter and discomfort and derision among his classmates and teachers alike. He grew to enjoy each beat of the process, each pursuant guffaw and groan and glare.

He began to add even more layers.

He never did it to be funny, of course, possibly.

Anyway, they all got bored with it.

He was, after all, nuts.

Meanwhile, in his new bedroom on Grassfield Road, the wall-camera business began wearing upon his mother. In his ninth summer, she demanded that he just stop. He would choose to remember it this way: “She said, ‘You cannot do these shows anymore unless you have an audience. Even if it’s only one person watching you.’ She thought,
Now he can’t do them anymore—ha ha ha!
This was very bad, in that he was onto something big by now. Panicked, he sought solution; his brother could not have been less interested, was always outside playing, anyway; friends were not an option, really; finally, he noticed another person in his family, female, two years of age, very
malleable. “My sister loved bubble gum. So what I would do was bribe her. I’d give her a piece of bubble gum every day if she would just sit in the room. Also, I wasn’t shy in front of her, because she didn’t know how to talk. So she would be my audience—and that was my loophole. I got my mother on that one.”

Big break came the year before. Out of the blue. Changed everything. Started everything. Thus the panic and the desperate need for practice. Finally, for once, he had acquired a proper audience—not a gaggle of bemused/hectoring onlookers (as with schoolyard), or a loophole (as would his sister become), but an actual rapt assemblage that sat in little folding chairs to watch him. “I had a movie projector, and a friend of the family asked me if I would show some movies at his daughter’s birthday party. I said sure and I did some stuff between films.” Whatever the stuff, no memory would be retained. Musical chairs? Fun with phonograph? Magic tricks? All very likely. Certainly all would figure later, very much later, and also sooner. But this was his fleeting debut at something really real. It was a taste. It filled him with ideas. He got to do in public that which was previously private or semi-such. Gently, tentatively, he had performed for children who
wanted
and
expected
him to perform for them. And they seemed to kind of enjoy him. Little birthday party children, they liked him. This was very very good. He would do more. He could see it very clearly.